Obama has no intention of releasing Pollard, White House says

Hours after President Shimon Peres sent a personal appeal to President Barack Obama to pardon Jonathan Pollard, the White House said Monday its position has not changed, and the president has no intention to release the convicted spy, AP reported.

Pollard has been hospitalized at a prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, since April 4.

A lawyer for Pollard, 57, said that for more than a year his client has suffered from increasingly debilitating and incapacitating medical problems that have resulted in emergency surgeries and other emergency medical procedures.

Pollard’s hospitalization brought renewed calls for his release from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Peres.

Democratic and Republican administrations in the U.S. have repeatedly refused Israeli appeals to release Pollard.

Pollard was a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy when he copied and gave to his Israeli handlers enough classified documents to fill a walk-in closet. Arrested in 1985 after unsuccessfully seeking refuge at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Pollard was convicted and sentenced two years later to life in prison.

Pollard attorney Eliot Lauer says his client’s medical problems have included loss of balance, fainting, repeated falls, extreme dizziness, severe nausea and excruciating abdominal pain in the area of the gall bladder and pancreas. Lauer says excruciating pain was the immediate problem that caused the current hospitalization, and doctors are awaiting results of tests to try to locate the nature of the problem.

In accordance with Bureau of Prisons policy, Bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley would not give the reason for Pollard’s hospital admission.

Peres told Obama in his letter Monday that the Pollard family and the Jewish people are concerned for his deteriorating health, and said the president should consider this factor and release Pollard. This act would attest to the American president’s partnership with the Jewish and Israeli people, Peres said.

Peres had pledged Sunday to use “all the tools at my disposal” to win the release of Pollard, who is currently hospitalized in the US.

Peres told Esther Pollard that he is “very concerned about the recent reports about Jonathan’s health,” according to quotes released by Peres’s office.

Esther Pollard said “time is running out” for her husband. “I ask you to contact President Obama today on humanitarian grounds and ask him not to send him back to jail,” she told Peres.

She said she was making her appeal because she is Pollard’s wife and does “not want to become his widow.”

Peres was Israel’s prime minister when Pollard was exposed as an Israeli agent in 1985.